Entertainment

13 Potential Breakout Apps To Watch at SXSW 2011

There are few conferences as notorious for launching startups from obscurity to relative mainstream as SXSW. Foodspotting, Foursquare, and Twitter are just a few of the companies that attribute at least part of their launch success to the conference.

“If you hit the right 100 people at SXSW with, let’s say, Twitter, you can effectively hit everyone there if you have a strong impression on 100 people,” says Tim Ferris, who presented his first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, at SXSW 2007.

What will be the Twitter of SXSW 2011? There are plenty of companies that could possibly make a big splash at this year's conference, most of them mobile apps. Our 13 top picks are listed below.

1., 2., 3. and 4. Group Messaging Apps

Free group-texting app GroupMe launched in August as a simple way to text a group of people at once. They've raised $10.6 million in funding and added features for sharing current locations and photos within groups.

Since then, the group-messaging space has all but exploded with the arrival of numerous serious contenders. Fast Society, another SMS-based service, launched in September, allowing users to set a time frame for their group conversations and offering conference calls and location sharing.

IM app Kik was downloaded more than 2 million times in the three weeks after its October launch. The app functions instantly, like BBM, rather than relying on asynchronous and and often expensive text messages. This week, the app announced an $8 million round of funding, as well as group and photo features.

And then there's Beluga, which allows users to end instant group messages, photos and location information across multiple platforms. The messaging app launched in December only to be acquired by Facebook in March.

So far there's no clear leader among these group messaging apps (and a heap of others), but SXSW — a massive conference that requires massive coordination among teams — makes an ideal place for one to emerge.

It's possible that all of the group-texting apps at SXSW will be out-staged by an even simpler group-communication tool: HeyTell. The free app simply turns Android phones or iPhones into walkie talkies. The app already has more than 4 million users.

The company recently rolled out a new feature that allows users to HeyTell message other users nearby. Which could either be very useful or very obnoxious in a high-density setting like SXSW.

Yobongo offers a slightly less intrusive way to make serendipitous connections than broadcasting out of a stranger's walkie talkie. The app places nearby users into a chat room with each other (this introduces a potentially problematic provision: In order to be useful, other people in the room need to have downloaded the app). Chat members can see each other's avatars and start private conversations aside from the group.

Creepy or useful? Networking mecca SXSW will be a great place to find out.

Apps that allow users to take and share photos from their mobile phones launched, won funding and updated like crazy throughout 2010. SXSW might help one or more of these apps enter the consciousness of the average smartphone owner.

Picplz and Instagram offer users filters to enhance the photos they take with their phones and options to share them to social networks. Instagram launched in October and quickly became a leader in sheer number of users. By December, the app was seeing two-to-three uploads per second. Picplz, which launched in May, hasn't reported staggering adoption rates, but has earned respect — and funds — from investors like Andreessen Horowitz.

Meanwhile, Path takes a different approach, creating a selective network of 50 or fewer friends for users to share photos with.

Hashable Founder Michael Yavonditte describes the check-in service as "check-ins for people." Using the app or website, Hashable users can choose to broadcast who they're #meeting, #raninto or had #lunch with to Twitter, or to keep it between their "inner circle" of connections. To make this easy, the app pulls in contacts from Twitter and any webmail accounts the user adds. People can also use the service to make introductions between their connections and exchange business card information.

In the meantime, using the apps will build a database of "relationship records" and allow people to learn who in their network is connecting with whom. At a conference, the app can be useful to keep track of new connections (no business cards to run out of or lose). In fact, the company intends to show off its conferencing functionality at SXSW this year, where it will send 20 of its top users to introduce the networking technology.

LiquidSpace gives the people who crouch on the floor with their laptops at conferences like SXSW an alternative. The startup, which launched on Tuesday, is like an AirBnB for workspaces. When users open the app, they see a list of available workspaces near them that they can reserve for a set price.

Venues range from hotels with free conference rooms to startups with extra desks. Anyone can list a space, and the venue is free to set its own prices and approve guests.

LiquidSpace is making its debut at SXSW with four pop-up work spaces that can be reserved using its app, including a tour bus outfitted as an office inside. After SXSW, the service will launch in the Bay area with about 50 more venues.

Lanyard is a crowdsourced guide to social conferences. Sign in with your Twitter profile, and the site automatically shows you what conferences people who you follow are planning on speaking at or attending. Since event organizers and other users are encouraged to add conference panels and speakers, your contacts need not be Lanyrd users to be included. Can't attend all of the conferences that you want to? The site also collects conference videos, slide decks and handouts in a searchable database to help absent users get the information that was presented.

SXSW will be the first test drive of Lanyrd at a major conference, and the startup is treating it as such. In February, it launched an unofficial guide to the conference that shows users which sessions their contacts will be at and allows them to search by topic for conference materials that match their interests.

Launched in November by the creator of Texts From Last Night, Bnter allows users to post their messages (from last night or otherwise) on the web for others to read. Users can follow each others' accounts and comment on the conversations.

SXSW is supposedly a hotspot of interesting conversation, but will people really want to post them to the web? As of now, witty comments like the one highlighted in the image above seem to dominate the site over, let's say, discussions about why academic tech research matters.

On the other hand, the massive list of parties planned during the conference do present a ripe opportunity for sharing the former type of content, so SXSW could be a perfect place for this app to hit the big time.

Mashable
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